2443 papers
Statistical mechanics explores how the chaotic motion of countless tiny particles gives rise to the predictable laws governing heat, pressure, and phase transitions. This field bridges the gap between the microscopic world of atoms and the macroscopic reality we experience daily, offering deep insights into why materials behave the way they do.
On Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category as it appears on arXiv to make these complex findings accessible to everyone. For each paper, we provide both a plain-language explanation for the curious reader and a detailed technical summary for specialists, ensuring that groundbreaking research is never lost behind a wall of jargon.
Below are the latest papers in statistical mechanics, freshly curated and summarized to help you understand the cutting edge of this fascinating discipline.
This paper presents a spatially-explicit Prisoner's Dilemma model demonstrating that populations with high truth-telling probabilities evolve into stable groups of cooperative truth-tellers, while those with low probabilities become stable groups of lying defectors, as intermediate values yield lower average scores.
This paper demonstrates that continuous quantum measurements can be used to tailor the dynamical signatures of quantum chaos, specifically by extending the ramp in the generalized spectral form factor, with unit-efficiency monitoring revealing enhanced chaotic behavior compared to both average dynamics and unitary evolution.
This paper demonstrates that passive qubit reset times can be significantly accelerated by exploiting the Mpemba effect through a simple entangling gate protocol that converts slow-decaying local coherences into fast-decaying global coherences, a method validated both theoretically and experimentally on a superconducting quantum processor.
Using the Stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation, this study demonstrates that temperature-driven false vacuum decay in a two-dimensional coherently coupled Bose-Bose mixture exhibits exponential dependence on temperature consistent with instanton theory, while simultaneously revealing dynamic phase behavior during the decay process.
This paper proposes a mean-field theory for nonequilibrium phase transitions to temporally oscillating states in spin models, utilizing a generalized Landau free energy and a Hamiltonian order parameter to characterize the onset of oscillations and a non-trivial overlap distribution reminiscent of replica symmetry breaking despite the absence of disorder.
This paper elucidates the relationship between Markovianity and progressive quenching by demonstrating that the hidden martingale property arises from the canonicity of the two-layer ensemble underpinned by Markovian dynamics and detailed balance, while also extending the framework to non-Markovian systems where trajectory-wise detailed balance and delayed interactions can preserve or compensate for canonical structures.
This paper generalizes the concept of complex landscapes to far-from-equilibrium systems by demonstrating how a stochastic spin model with non-reciprocal and heterogeneous interactions exhibits hidden spontaneous oscillations that can be unveiled through entropy production density and characterized via a configurational entropy counting nonequilibrium collective states.
This paper demonstrates through numerical simulations and analytical derivation that collective oscillations in a three-dimensional spin model with non-reciprocal interactions arise from two successive phase transitions: the emergence of local noisy oscillators followed by their synchronization into coherent macroscopic oscillations.
This paper demonstrates that while separable quenched disorder masks the oscillating phase transition in a non-reciprocal mean-field spin model when observing standard magnetisation, the transition can be successfully detected through specific disorder-dependent observables, third-order susceptibilities, and the overlap distribution.
This paper proposes and validates a physical framework that models ant chemotactic navigation as an effective magnetic interaction, successfully explaining the observed oscillatory motion along pheromone trails through analytical predictions and experimental data.